Exploring Tonal Effects on the Perception of Word-Final Nasals: A Preliminary Study in Southern Min (original) (raw)
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The relative perceptual confusability of the coda nasals /m/, /n/, and / / was investigated in Southern Min and Mandarin for insight into the nasal mergers that have happened in the history of the Chinese languages. Coda /m/ was the most confusable of the nasals, mirroring the historical pattern in which the bilabial was the first coda nasal to be lost. In both Southern Min and Mandarin, the alveolar and velar nasals were mutually confused. Identification of coda nasals was affected by the preceding vowel; there was lower accuracy following the high front vowel /i/ than other vowels. Tone did not have any consistent effects on nasal identification, although Southern Min speakers tended to have less accurate identification of nasals with low tones.
Acoustic Cues of Vowel Quality to Coda Nasal Perception in Southern Min
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Acoustic properties of Cantonese final alveolar and velar nasals
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Nasal consonants, sonority and syllable phonotactics: the dual nasal hypothesis
Phonology
We investigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the common classification of nasals as intermediate between obstruents and liquids on the sonority hierarchy. Instead, we propose that there are two types of nasal consonants, one group with lower sonority than liquids and one with higher sonority. We propose that these two types of nasals differ in the presence or absence of a value for the feature [±continuant].
Phonetic implementation of nasality in Taiwanese (and French): Aerodynamic case studies
This paper aims at systematically investigating the aerodynamics of nasalization in Taiwanese, a language that has a nasality contrast in its vowels but are subject to stricter restrictions on nasality distribution than French. Our results show that i) the onset consonantal effects on nasal anticipatory coarticulation are subtly different between the two languages; in particular, voiced stops avoid nasal contexts in Taiwanese, ii) in onset positions, aspirated stops and fricatives induce more nasal coarticulation, iii) coda [n] triggers the least anticipatory vowel nasalization in both languages, iv) the production of nasal vowels are generally the same and vowel height is positively correlated with nasalization in both languages, v) that French has more nasal airflow volume than Taiwanese does, but no significant difference could be found as far as nasal airflow duration is concerned. Taken together, our results confirm that phonological patterning does have a bearing on phonetic implementation.
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This study, part of a programmatic research on the Twi language, deals with data about the acoustic properties of nasal vowels compared to the oral counterparts. Acoustic results of the production of durational and quality contrasts are presented. Evidence from our acoustic data shows a general tendency whereby F2 and F3 of the nasal vowels are lower than the oral counterparts in both the short and long contexts. Acoustic data also reveal that nasal-oral contrast depends on the vowel type. Nasal vowels have higher durational values than oral vowels in the two phonological categories.
Perception of assimilated and non-assimilated coda nasal by Japanese learners of German
2015
This study investigates the perception of the German coda nasal contrast /n/-/m/-/ŋ/ by Japanese learners of German compared to German native speakers. The phonological distribution of coda nasals differs with/without word boundaries in the two languages. Word final coda before a pause in Japanese is neutralized to /ɴ/ but the place feature remains in German. Assimilation of coda nasals before consonants is obligatory in Japanese but not in German. Two experiments were conducted to test how syllable-final nasals with/without word boundary are perceived by Japanese speakers. The results show that Japanese listeners are sensitive to the duration of the nasal, a perceptual cue to wordfinal neutralized nasals. Durational manipulation reinforced or weakened Japanese learners' perception, suggesting that nasal assimilation is related to the length of the nasal.
Acoustic characteristics of vowel nasalization
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1974
In order to study the nasalization of vowels, a set of CVCV utterances read by several speakers has been analyzed. The consonent C consisted of nasal consonant (/m/,/n/,/ŋ/) and voiced stops (/b/,/d/,/g/). The vowel V was one of seven vowels. The utterances were analyzed using predictive coding and cepstral prediction technics (to detect zero frequencies). Formant frequencies and bandwidth frequencies were studied to find acoustic correlates of vowel nasalization. The associated vowel affected which acoustic correlate of nasalization was most salient. For instance, the nasalization of the vowels /a/ and /æ/ are mainly characterized by a weakness of FI, whereas for the vowel /i/ a nasal formant with large bandwidth can be detected between the first and the second formant. Furthermore, the degree of shifting of the formant frequencies depends on the vowel. Possible application of the results to the detection of nasalization and the identification of nasalized vowels is discussed.
Nasal release, nasal finals and tonal contrasts in Hanoi Vietnamese: an aerodynamic experiment
2006
The present research addresses three issues in the phonetics of Hanoi Vietnamese: (i) What are the airflow characteristics of the obstruent-final rhymes? (ii) Rhymes with final nasal consonants /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ show no acoustic trace of the final nasal segment when they carry tone B2 (orthographic tone nặng); does the nasal airflow on these rhymes differ significantly from what is observed on obstruent-final rhymes (which, from a phonological point of view, do not have any nasal segment)? (iii) How often are nasal-final, glottally constricted rhymes followed by a nasal release, and is this release similar to the nasal release which has been reported for rhymes with final obstruents /p/, /t/, /k/? Nasal airflow measurements of 391 syllables read by one speaker (and supporting data from two other speakers) go to show that nasal airflow 2 Nasal release, nasal finals and tonal contrasts in Vietnamese does not distinguish successfully between nasal-final rhymes carrying tone B2 and obstruent-final rhymes, and that unvoiced nasal release is more frequent after obstruents /p/, /t/, /k/ than after B2-tone rhymes ending in nasals. By contrast, simultaneously recorded oral airflow brings out a clear difference between these two sets of rhymes, confirming that voice quality plays a key role in maintaining the distinction between these rhymes, which are similar from the point of view of oral articulation.